


making hollywood look tiny

by oephelia



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: (or at least not canon compliant post season two), Coming Out, Developing Relationship, Domestic, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Period Typical Attitudes, Tenderness, the slightly complicated happily ever after billy and steve and max deserve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-23 20:43:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21087551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oephelia/pseuds/oephelia
Summary: He’ll take an inch and make it everything if Billy will justgiveit to him.(or what happiness could look like for steve and billy, topped with a cherry.)





	making hollywood look tiny

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eternalgoldfish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternalgoldfish/gifts).

> a gift for a hard week, many weeks late. i wrote all the magic i could into this, i hope it doesn't wear off.

step i.

_Closer_, Steve thinks. _Closer._

He wants Billy so close he can taste his cologne, stinging sharp in his throat with every breath, but he’ll take an inch and make it everything if Billy will just _give_ it to him.

_Closer._

It’s that fizzing, trembling new-crush feeling.

They’re in the grocery store and Billy’s reaching for a box of his favorite brand of laundry soap, because he has a favorite, because the other ones make him sneeze, it’s so _gross_ that Steve knows any of this. Billy’s reaching, and his shirt’s riding up in the back, and Steve’s whole world is the gold-soft glimpse of skin. _Higher higher closer closer._

They’re on the sofa that Billy picked and Steve paid for, in the apartment they split rent on every month, even though it was only meant to be for the summer while Billy saved to move away. Steve won’t ask how much he has saved now, ten months in, because -- because -- because they’re on the sofa, and Billy’s toes are digging into Steve’s thigh, and Steve says _cut your fucking toenails_, and means _closer_.

They’re doing dishes like the old married couple that, God, sometimes Steve wishes they were, so that he could push his body into the negative space of Billy’s without startling him into dropping a plate. He’s greedy and impatient and tired of the bits before, stepping careful, speaking careful, he wants to _have_ and to _hold_. Billy passes him the plate. Billy wipes his sudsy fingers on Steve’s shirt, and Steve fumbles it. _Closer_ is the two-syllable in-out catch of his breath.

They’re watching a movie, because high school’s over and no one _parties_ anymore, or maybe neither of them really have _friends_ to party with anymore, and even though they’re still not legal, it’s just less _fun_ to get fucked up at home than it is to sneak eye-water mouth-burn vodka into overpriced icees. It’s dark, and they’re sharing popcorn, and Steve wants to lick the grease off Billy’s fingers. Wants him to leave fingerprints on the back of Steve’s throat. He thinks maybe even that wouldn’t be close enough, that he would still, eyes watering mouth burning, ask for _more_ and _closer_ and _closer_ and _closer_.

This is a crush. Steve is being crushed.

_Kiss me_, he thinks, when Billy has mustard at the corner of his mouth. 

_Touch me_, he thinks, when Billy’s rolling for both of them and biting his tongue to concentrate. 

_Fuck me_, he thinks, most seconds of most minutes of most days. (When Billy’s drinking straight from their tap, mouth wet, ends of his hair damp. When Billy’s home with a new tattoo, skin achy pink, and he lets Steve touch it with fingertips so light he’s not sure he’s made contact at all. When Billy leans back and makes Steve want to learn the name of every muscle that shifts and bunches and tightens under his skin, makes Steve want to press his face into Billy’s stomach, makes Steve want and want and want. When Billy’s _there_ and so’s Steve. It doesn’t take much.) 

The thing is, if he asks, Billy might not say no. 

Because when he’s looking, Billy’s looking back. Because Billy’s never close enough, but he’s also never very far away. 

If he says _closer_, hooks his fingers into Billy’s belt loops, tugs him in until there’s no fresh air between them, and Billy comes _closer_, puts his mouth on him his teeth in him his fingers round him? 

That’s not a crush. Steve’s not entirely sure what it is.

He wants it. He’s terrified. He wants it.

They’re in the too-small bathroom together, which has been happening more and more, Steve in the shower, Billy brushing his teeth, in the half hour half a toast-slice gray sky still asleep mornings before they leave for work. 

Steve shuts off the water, leans around the shower curtain for his towel. Their eyes meet in the circle of rubbed clear mirror. Billy’s just spit, and there’s a smudge of white caught in the scraggly hair above his lip. In the mirror, Steve watches his tongue come out, like an anxious dog, to lick over the pinkness of his mouth. 

_C’mere_, he says, still half in, half out, _you got a little something_, oldest move in the book. He watches Billy’s face hesitate, caught for a second like the mirror’s stopped working, stuck on its last remembered frame. 

Billy could reach up to wipe it away. He turns around instead, one step, two step. His face, glowing up at Steve’s, looks like maybe they’re both dreaming something big. 

_Closer_, Steve says, hand out. Billy comes closer, steps into the curve of Steve’s palm, lets Steve’s thumb swipe over crisp gold and soft pink and mint white. 

_Closer_, Steve says, and Billy turns his face so his mouth is pressed, hot, against the meat of Steve’s hand. 

_Closer_, Steve says, and tugs Billy’s face to his, breathes the hotness right out of his mouth, drips shower damp and want down both their cheeks. Tastes the run-off of his own shampoo, synthetic sweet, pink and yellow where Billy tastes green and white and blue, until Billy’s tongue is in his mouth and everything tastes red.

It’s not a crush. They’ll figure it out as they go.

step ii.

Steve has his hand down Billy’s jeans, sticky damp and blood warm. He’s right there, in the chafe and pant and sweat of it, but he’s somewhere else too, a three am laundromat with Billy, sorting darks from lights, Billy’s socks curled coy into Steve’s.

More is more is more, and Steve can’t possibly get close enough.

Steve licks his fingers, after, tastes orange juice kisses and cheap Valentine's chocolates and morning after morning after morning breath.

Billy watches Steve lick his hand clean, flushed from the tips of his ears to his collarbone, and his breath is a hiccuping, hoarse thing, and then his head is falling forwards, like his forehead has been waiting for the curve of Steve’s neck. 

(They kiss and they touch and they fuck, and it’s better and so much worse than Steve thought it could be, but his favorite part, the part he hadn’t even known to want, is the part where Billy’s head finds its way to Steve’s shoulder.

There’s the hot present and the hazy future and they meet in that crook, and the press of Billy’s sweat slick skin.)

_You kiss your mother with that mouth_, Billy asks without moving. His hair tickles Steve’s cheek, smells non-descript floral, the kind of flower that’s just chemicals on chemicals. 

_Wouldn’t dare_, Steve says, with bitter-salt-Billy taste on the roof of his mouth. 

Billy sucks him off, and Steve sees stars and strobes and Billy coming home with smooth peanut butter, because he knows Steve likes it better.

It’s not like it was with Nancy, but then, Steve was always so busy watching her face, checking and checking and checking for the things that would tell him he wasn’t getting it wrong somehow. He was always stuck, awkwardly, in the moment. Loving and loving and scared that any second the loving would stop. 

They’re in Steve’s bed, and Billy’s head is tucked under Steve’s chin. Their breath is syncopated. 

Somewhere between the rise and fall of Billy’s ribs, Steve falls asleep and dreams that he’s in a bed, Billy’s head tucked under his chin, and the entire world is the sun and the moon and the room and the bed and they never have to leave.

step iii. 

There are words that Steve never realised he wanted to say.

_Billy_. It took Steve months to fit his mouth around it, to switch out two syllable Har-grove, clicking at the back of his throat, buzzing between tight lips, to Bil-ly, sweeter and softer, stretching out that plaintive _e_ into ever and ever eternity. What’s in a name -- a _b_, the press of lips, an _i_, lifting, an _l_, tongue pressed forward, an _l_, licking, a _y_, mouth feeling suddenly wide, stretching into a smile. 

_Bills_. One syllable that stretches like bubblegum wrapped around Billy’s finger, swells like the bubble of it between Billy’s lips, watermelon-scented and worked into pastel translucence. When Billy pushes the gum into Steve’s mouth, spit-slick and sugary, Steve takes it; when Steve smoothes the shake out of Billy’s shoulders after he’s come, and says _god Bills, what a m e s s_, Billy takes it and takes it and takes it, greedily. 

_Bill_. So achingly sincere.

_B_. Working Billy smaller and smaller, down to a single letter that stands in for everything. Sweet as a honeybee, heavy as to be or not to be, _b_ is for burning toast when Steve gets lost in licking constellations between the freckles on Billy’s shoulders, _b_ is how bright the sun shines when summer comes again and Billy signs to renew their lease, _b_ is for blue, and for brave, and for beautiful. 

_Baby_. They trade it back and forth, like a new word. _Baby_, in Steve’s scrawled post-it love letters, _we need milk_. _Right there baby just like that oh_, panted between their mouths. _C’mere, baby, I gotcha_, when Billy pretends he isn’t an inch shorter and can reach the things Steve can’t. _Missed you, baby_, at the end of every day, like Steve’s had to go longer than a six hour shift between Billy morning-bright and Billy evening-worn. _Such a cry-baby_, kissed into Steve’s eyelids when Billy’s given it to him so good his eyes are liquid-soft and leaking. _Baby baby baby_ like the rest of the English language has nothing left for them.

_Babe_. It’s a Billy word, and when he says it it’s California-golden. A little condescending, a little syrupy. It goes down sleaze-easy every time, like Billy’s hand slipping into the back pocket of his jeans, like Billy blowing over damp skin just to watch him shudder, like Billy tugging at his hair where it’s getting long enough to curl over the collar of his shirt again. 

_Boyfriend_. Steve knows the word for what he wants from Billy. It doesn’t make it any easier to say.

(He realises they have cutlery, enough mismatched knives and forks and spoons to fill a drawer. Somehow, they’ve accumulated like loose change, like aches and pains, like the months of kisses and droplets of sweat and _baby baby babies_.)

What would it mean, anyway, to ask, when it would be another word that could only exist here, in the four walls of their tiny world with the curtains drawn? 

(He sometimes wishes they could be kids again, bloody-kneed and gap-toothed and ready to pinkie swear themselves together forever, to carve their initials into any surface soft enough to take them, to swear a blood pact on their friendship with copper-slick thumbs pressed tight. Promises and forevers are slippery now, slippery for mostly-grown boys who sleep with their legs tangled together.)

Maybe it’s just a word for everything they already are and have and do.

(He’s on the phone to out-of-town Billy, on a crackling motel line, and he’s curling the cord between his fingers. He wishes Billy could see him, in this stupid lonely way, _make me real, be real to me too_, and all he feels is plastic. _Keep the bed warm for me_, Billy says, instead of good night. He says it like he’s already halfway to thinking about Steve jerking off in their bed. He says it like he wishes he could be there. Steve says _I love you_ for the first time, and hangs up.)

(Billy pierces Steve’s ear with a safety pin, heated red hot with his lighter, cooled fast. He’s holding Steve’s face still. _You gonna let me pop your cherry_, he asks, conversational, and while Steve’s squinting up at him, nose scrunched about it, he stabs through to the eraser Steve’s holding in place. Steve feels the rubbery-soft give of his earlobe, the sting. The knee-jerk tightening of Billy’s fingers around his jaw. He thinks he’d trust Billy with anything.)

(Billy licks marinara sauce off the spoon Steve needs to serve with. Billy sneaks pieces of browned mince before Steve stirs it into chilli. Billy dips his fingers in salad dressing and picks at crumbs and hooks his chin over Steve’s shoulder to _help_, tasting, adding too much salt, tasting again and one more time just to be _sure_. Steve complains, and Billy’s nose presses against the place behind his ear, and nothing’s serious except the one serious thing that lives in Steve’s chest and asks, gentle-cruel, for another fifty years of this.)

They drive to Lake Michigan on a weekend in mid-August, when it’s sticky hot and clear enough to take sleeping bags and sleep in the dunes. The water’s cold, blue-gray-green and shifting like it half-remembers the tidal pull. Billy’s skin is warm, soaks up the sun like it’s forgotten the taste. 

The daylight stretches and stretches, that strange summer-time feeling that maybe today is the last day there will ever be, that there will never be a night to end it. 

Steve is itchy-shoulder, cheap-beer happy.

And then they’re sitting in the popped-open trunk of Steve’s car, facing each other, Billy with his knees up to his chin in the gap between Steve’s legs. There isn’t enough space. Steve’s feet are all pins and needles, and his calves are starting to feel cramp-twitchy. 

He’s going to move.

There’s a sort of static glow to the feeling of Billy’s leg hair, close enough to not-quite-touch the insides of his thighs. Billy’s bare feet, damp, sand-crusty toes, not-quite-brushing the crotch of Steve’s jeans.

He’s going to move.

Billy’s blinking at him, eyes made of lakewater.

He doesn’t move, and in the long seconds of not moving, Billy says, _marry me_?

Steve feels suddenly, ringingly, deaf. 

_What_.

_Marry me._ Billy’s looking at him so blue, so brave, so beautiful. _I know you know what that means._

Steve doesn’t, at all.

_I don’t_, he says, and his legs are aching and his eyes are, inexplicably, aching. _I have no idea what you’re saying to me right now._

_I’m saying_, Billy says, _me and you, gold rings, let’s fuck off into the sunset._

When he says it like that, it sounds easy. 

_There are laws, Bill_, Steve says. Then, _and there’s Hawkins_.

Hawkins is the kids who won’t be kids much longer, and the parents who’ve never been the parents they needed, and the end of the world, probably, if they stay. It doesn’t feel like a convincing argument.

Billy says, patient and very soft, _there’s the whole rest of the world, too. There’s the ocean. Marry me._

And his hands are on Steve’s knees, heavy-warm, and the sun is finally going down so the whole world glows closed-eyelid-pink, and Steve says, _yes. Yes, I’ll marry you, you asshole._

Whatever that means.

step iv. 

It means: they wear two halves of a diamond stud set that Steve stole from his mom’s dressing table years ago just to see if she’d notice. She hadn’t. They’re worth more than everything else in their apartment combined, and if Steve were smarter, less sentimental, he’d sell them for a place to live, for the trip across the country, for the thousand and one things they’ll have to pay for together. Instead, he licks over the cold, hard clarity of Billy's and Billy shivers and Steve thinks _all this and no one even knows_.

It means: they decide not to move to California. Santa Monica was home for Billy, the way Hawkins has been home for Steve -- it feels like a barely scabbed over hurt. Billy’s told him about the pier, about surfing and his mom and the seagulls and the waves, _seven feet_. He’s full of longing but it’s not to go back. Billy’s told him too, between the lines, about hearing the man in the apartment above them knock his wife around, and the woman below with her television on as high as the volume could go, and the stuckness of it, the smallness, even with the blue sky and the blue sea stretching out and out forever. So his finger moves up the coast at random, up through California into Oregon. Stops when he hits a name he recognises. _I had a great-uncle called Eugene_, he says. 

It means: Billy gives Steve his ring, even though it’s silver, even though he slides it onto Steve’s middle finger and not his fourth. He says it’s a practice run and his eyes are bands of silver-blue around hungry pupils. Steve says _what about your vows_ and Billy says _for better for worse for richer or poorer I’m gonna be the best and only lay of the rest of your stupid life_, and cackles hyena laughter into Steve’s mouth. Steve hates him. Steve’s never wanted anything this much.

It means: they tell Max, together. They tell Max they are together. _No d u h_, she says. They tell Max that when their lease is up again, they’re getting out. She looks unsurprised in the same awful-bland way that Billy used to look after every fight. _We’ll get a two bed_, Steve says, like that’s something he can offer her. Billy doesn’t say anything, he just holds her very tight, and she’s grown so much he can rest his chin on the top of her head, easy. When his eyes meet Steve’s, Steve can see the tears wobbling, breaking to hot wet dampness in his lashes. They tell Max they’re going to get married out there, somehow, and her eyes swim too. _I’m best man_, she says. _Sure_, Billy says, like he’d have it any other way.

It means: they drive and they drive and they drive. Three days in the car with a suitcase of the few things they have worth keeping, three nights in scummy motel rooms with two single beds. Billy sings the whole way, and Steve threatens to throw his ring out the window more than once, and they’re so disgustingly happy. Steve’s not sure either of them deserve it. They glow with it anyway. 

It means: they find a two bed, and Billy carries Steve over the threshold like a real gentleman. Steve kicks at him and feels pink from the softness of his cheeks to the warm twist of his guts. 

It means, on an early morning in late September, they drive out to Heceta Beach. It means that, this time, when they face each other, it’s with the ocean ahead of them and everything else quiet behind them in the gray glow. 

Steve has two rings in his pocket. 

He takes Billy’s hands, warmer than his. Says, _you wanna do this?_

_I do_, Billy says, asshole-serious. 

He smells like Paco Rabanne and hairspray and cigarette smoke. His favorite curl is sitting pretty right in the middle of his forehead. He could be high school Billy Hargrove again, except there’s a smile in the corners of his eyes, a secret kiss in the corner of his mouth. 

_I love you_, Steve says, just to say it.

Billy lifts their joined hands to his mouth, presses that secret kiss to the base of Steve’s ring finger.

In the sunrise haze, they exchange rings, the only people in the world.

step v. 

They hear Max coming, _hello world I’m your wild girl_, tin-can car shaking with it.

She’s cut her hair chin-length. She has bangs, now. Somehow, impossibly, she has Billy’s too-big ears, too. Or maybe it’s just that Steve sees Billy everywhere, and Max, tall enough that she has to unfold from the driver’s seat, slouchy denim jacket rolled up at the cuffs and cigarette behind her ear, looks like she’s picked up Billy’s shrugged off adolescence, is trying it on for size. 

Billy tugs at her bangs, says _suits ya_.

She rolls her eyes, grabs his hand before it drops so she can examine the plain gold band. _Suits ya_, she says, and it’s half little-sister-shitty, half earnest.

Or sixty forty, anyway.

(It’s a flying visit. Just a couple days, then she’s headed to Berkeley for the fall semester, her very first. Steve thinks that makes him an adult, probably. Makes them both adults. 

They have a fruit bowl. Max sees it, and laughs and laughs and laughs.)

On Saturday, they watch Saturday morning cartoons, Steve and his cowlick, Billy and his flannel robe, Max sitting between them with her feet tucked tight under her. They make Hargrove-Mayfield coffee, burnt and bitter and taken tar-black. They turn the volume way down, and Billy and Max do uncanny-perfect impressions. 

Midway through _The Flintstones_, Billy leans over Max, says, _hey babe, wanna know why they call me Fred Flintstone?_ and Max says, _n o_ and Steve says, _no_ but with maybe a little less conviction, and Billy’s tongue flicks, wet, over his lips before he says, _‘cos I can make your bedrock_, all seventeen-again self-satisfaction. Max says, _I hate you both_, and gets up for more coffee. Steve doesn’t want to reward bad behaviour but he kisses Billy anyway, can’t help it, coffee-sour smiles melting where they touch.

On Sunday, Max asks them to take her to their beach. It’s a muggy, gray-warm day, the sort that promises a long, rolling storm at the end of it. The trees look greener than green, and the sea looks colorless, and Max is cherry red and glowing as she wades into the shallows. Billy’s wearing her heart-shaped sunglasses. It feels like a sea-glass moment, a sharp thing worn smooth and strange by time and salt and touching. Steve pockets it.

The rain comes mid-afternoon and drives Max back up the sand, with her hair dark-damp and dripping down bare arms. She looks suddenly self-conscious, like she’s been caught by more than the downpour, combing her fingers through her now-scraggly bangs, wiping away smudges of mascara that Steve hadn’t known she was wearing. She pulls on her jacket. She looks younger than she’s looked all weekend.

Billy perches her sunglasses back on the top of her head, gentle. Pops her collar.

Pauses.

There’s writing on the underside. Billy’s face is doing something complicated.

He smoothes one side, _rebel_. The other, _dyke_. Embroidered in white stitches, gone over again and again until the lines are clumsy-thick and loud and certain. 

Billy’s hands are on Max’s shoulders. There’s rainwater dripping off the end of his nose.

_That shit ain’t cute, Maxine,_ he says. 

Steve watches Max’s face screw up tight. He has no idea what he’s meant to say.

_It’s not f u n n y_, Billy says, louder. 

Max says, _that’s because it’s not a j o k e._

She’s red-cheeked and wet-eyed, but she hasn’t pulled out of Billy’s grip.

A moment, where nothing exists but the place where the rain is blurring colorless sky into colorless sea.

_So you’re_, Steve says. 

_Yeah_, she says.

Rain, sky, sea, Billy’s hands, Max’s eyes, _rebel dyke_, a shivering secret thing.

_Shit_, Billy says, and lets go.

_Yeah_, she says, like she’s deflating. Like she had no right to expect anything better. Her face is settling into that awful-bland stillness.

_Shit_, Billy says again. 

Then he’s wrapping his arms around her, pulling her close, face in her hair. Steve thinks he presses a kiss there, too fast to be sure. 

He loves them both, with the white-hot jarring intensity of a lightning strike.

On Monday, Max leaves. They watch her car rattle away, Billy’s arm solid around Steve’s shoulders. 

_You think she’s gonna be okay_, Billy asks. 

Steve saw her leave her sunglasses on their kitchen counter, deliberate, like a reason to come back, or a promise. He nods.

_I know so._

step vi. 

A record scratch, then slow wisp-thin synth.

_It’s our song, baby_, Billy says, like they have a song, like they’ve ever had a song.

But his hands are insistent-warm where they’re sliding under Steve’s shirt, and he smells like end-of-the-day cologne, settled in the cracks of his skin, spice softened to sweetness, so this can be their song, if he wants it to be.

Breathy vocals, _hah ha-ha ha-ah hah_.

When Billy sings along, Steve can feel it all down his spine.

Neither of them can dance, not sober, not serious. Steve went to senior prom with a girl he hasn’t seen since. Billy skipped entirely. They’ll never have a wedding reception.

They get this, instead, swaying easy in the early evening gloom while the streetlights come on outside.

Their whole world is the soft blue dusk gathering at the corners of the room. The frame tightens, and their whole world is the four foot rug they’re standing on. Again, and their whole world is the constellation of feeling from the place where their foreheads meet to where Billy’s fingers curl to where Steve’s hands join behind Billy’s neck to where Steve’s socked toes brush Billy’s bare ones.

_I know this much is true._

It’s more than enough.

**Author's Note:**

> please come talk to me in the comments or on my tumblr ([oephelia](https://oephelia.tumblr.com) / [oepheliawrites](https://oepheliawrites.tumblr.com)) -- i love you all & i'm excited to hear yr thoughts and feelings, always ! 
> 
> credit to [caddie](https://harringroveheart.tumblr.com/) fr billy & steve dancing to spandau ballet, i've been Obsessed w that concept since her author's note on chapter three of [maybe there is a beast](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18766060)
> 
> & title credits to [mika](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFrxrOt06SA)
> 
> (there is no greater sweetness or generosity or tenderness than the love story that is this song, and this fic couldn't exist without it:
> 
> step one, come a little closer  
step two, rest upon my shoulder  
step three, i'm calling you baby  
three steps away from me
> 
> step four, we can get married  
step five, top it with a cherry  
step six, as good as it gets  
now come along & step with me)


End file.
